sleep and Timer

[Rob Hall]

"Peter Hansen" <peter at engcorp.com> wrote in message
news:3ED4FD59.6127DCE7 at engcorp.com...
> Rob Hall wrote:
> >
> > I have a thread which needs to download a web page and process it
> > periodically (every couple of minutes).  Up until now, in the thread I
have
> > had something like this:
> >
> > def run(self):
> >     while self.quit = false:
> >         DO SOME STUFF
> >         time.sleep(120)
>
> Perhaps simpler than your Timer based approach would be something like
this:
>
> def run(self):
>     import time
>     start = time.time()
>     while not self.quit:  # bad practice to test equal to false
>         if time.time() - start >= 120:
>             DO SOME STUFF
>             start = time.time()
>         else:
>             time.sleep(5)
>
> This way the thread wakes up every few seconds to check whether it should
> terminate.  For small scripts, this might be good enough.
>
> -Peter

I did end up implementing something like that, the trouble is, it can still
take up to 5 seconds for the app to die.  I could set it to sleep for 0.5
seconds, but that seems to be a waste of processor time to me.

Rob